1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to prefetching computer files and, more specifically, to a method and apparatus for prefetching data for transmission to a user computer.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many users of the Internet subscribe to services such as “Storage On Demand” to augment the needs of data storage. In such services, users can obtain storage resources by purchasing the services of the online storage service provider. Most of the user's data stored in the online storage pools is multimedia data, for example movies, pictures and music files.
When multimedia files are played, they are streamed from the storage resources to the application, for example Windows Media Player, running on the user's computer. As the multimedia data file is accessed remotely through a computer network, for example, the Internet or a LAN and the like, latency in receiving the file contents may negatively affect the user's experience. Latency may be caused by a limited connection speed, available local storage, caching methods and similar reasons. Such latency causes discontinuities in the reception of data and gaps in presentation caused by these discontinuities are often experienced by the user. Conventional pre-fetching methods and caching methods provided by conventional file systems have been insufficient to remedy such discontinuities. These methods also create undo transmission bandwidth burden upon the network. Inefficient caching and pre-fetching methods do not provide the user with a seamless data access, for example, a seamless music or movie playing experience.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a method and apparatus that improves the performance of data access from a data storage to a user computer.